Health and social care

This study was commissioned by the Department for Education

We examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare

This Briefing Note looks at the potential for the introduction of a 'fat tax' into the UK in an effort to reduce the growing prevalence of obesity in Britain. This Briefing Note looks at trends in UK obesity and examines evidence on eating habits and exercise in order to see whether trends here can account for what we see happening to obesity. We go on to review some of the key economic reasons behind why we might be concerned about obesity and why we might consider there to be a case for government intervention. We also discuss how food is currently taxed and the various ways in which a 'fat tax' might be introduced, looking at particular issues the government might need to address should it wish to introduce one. We finish by presenting some simple analysis of a hypothetical 'fat tax' in terms of how it might impact differently on the rich and the poor.

In this paper we evaluate the impact of a major school reform, that took place in the 1950s in Sweden, on educational attainment and earnings.

In this paper we study the determinants of child anthropometrics on a sample of poor Colombianchildren living in small municipalities.

his paper uses the measures of basic skills (or functional literacy) in the International Adult Literacy Survey to examine the impact of education and basic skills on earnings across a large number of countries.

This paper reports on the short run impact of one of the U.K. government's flagship education policies, the Excellence in Cities (EiC) program.

This paper considers the identification of the effect of tobacco on mortality.

The Government's plans for reforming Higher Education (HE) funding have been a source of great controversy. Much of this controversy has been focused on what the reforms will mean for students from different family income backgrounds, and on the levels of debt they may need to incur to go to higher education. Concern has also been raised about how graduates will be affected by these debt repayments throughout their working lives, as well as whether or not the funds raised will improve the situation of universities significantly. This Briefing Note addresses these issues, as well as describing the evolution of the proposed reforms to Higher Education funding in recent months. In doing this, we set out and explain the system which is most likely to be implemented if the HE Bill is passed, and discuss the ways in which students, graduates, and universities are likely to be affected. We also consider the possible effects on the taxpayer.

This note outlines the preliminary findings of the evaluation of a welfare programme in Colombia, Familias en Accíon. The programme aims to foster nutritional and educational development for the children of poor families in rural and urban communities, and the evaluation will use data collected from treatment and control areas to discover what methods are effective and how they work. In this note, we describe what the data show about the population and what the preliminary findings indicate about the efficacy of the programme.

This Briefing Note provides an overview of public spending in the UK. It describes the components of public spending and examines trends in expenditure.

In this paper I summarize some recent developments in the literature on the econometrics of program evaluation.

We produce projections of state and private long-term care expenditure and analyse the distributional impact of state-financed care, through innovative linking of macro- and micro-simulation models.

Regression, matching, control function and instrumental variables methods for recovering the impact of education on individual earnings are reviewed for single treatment and sequential multiple treatments with and without heterogeneous returns.

This paper uses two sets of cross-country micro datasets to analyse individuals participation in voluntary and community activities and organisations.

In this commentary, IFS compares the reforms proposed by the two parties, looking at the effect on student and graduate finances, the distributional impact on households with different incomes, and the cost to the Exchequer and taxpayers in general.

We have compiled a non-technical and relatively brief policy summary of an extensive CEE research programme which has focused on the relative value of different academic and vocational qualifications in the British labour market, how this value differs for different subgroups of the population and how this value has changed over time.